NBA '08 Hands-on

Share.

We step onto the court with Sony's upcoming basketball title.

By Jeff Haynes

Last year, Sony tried to do some pretty ambitious moves with their basketball franchise for the PS3. Bringing the gameplay into 1080p was visually impressive, and adding Games of the Week and NBA Replay provided a lot of depth to the title. At Sony's Gamers Day, we managed to get a little hands on with the newest installment for the PS3, NBA '08. From what we saw, the subtle changes made to this version will provide a much stronger play experience.

One of the newest focuses this year is having players "get high or get wide" on defense to accurately hinder an opposing player's strengths. For example, if you wind up guarding a shooter, you'll want your selected defender to get high and put his hands up to hamper any possible clean looks at the basket. On the other hand, if you have a guy that likes to slash to the basket, you'll want to get low to complicate their ability to drive the lane or knife through your defense. What's particularly cool about the "get high or get wide" concept is that it's solely Sixaxis driven. By tilting the controller up, you get your defender's hands up, while tilting down makes the players crouch low. This new Sixaxis functionality isn't solely contained to defenders. If you're not dribbling the ball, you can tilt the Sixaxis to keep the ball away from overzealous defenders trying to steal the ball away from you.

A couple of other changes have been made in the gameplay arena. For one thing, the ball physics have been completely redone for this year's title, so players can now expect a lot more realism, like the possibility for tipped passes during transition play or defensive steal attempts. Transition play has also been tightened up, so players will move much like their real life counterparts would during certain plays. This includes eliminating the continual warp reset to the basket that players would perform when a point was scored, which should provide players an opportunity to get a fast break if an opposing team is dogging it on the court. However, don't expect these guys to look like plastic army men any more as they run up and down the court. The sweat engine has thankfully been toned down significantly, which helps to take advantage of the new skin texturing that shows off a player's pores, arm hair, tattoos or other marks. Coupled with a new cloth system that tracks the folds in a player's uniform at any point on the court, as well as the reflectivity of shorts and jerseys, and you'll pick up on a lot of visual improvements to players.

Another focus of NBA 08 is on the progression system, which will let players earn "experience points" through any particular game mode that they happen to play. These points will be used to unlock various items, like jerseys, wristbands and sneakers, which will have various stat boosting attributes. Whenever a player decides to create a player for the game, you can then use these items to outfit your player and give them an edge on the competition. Since you'll always acquire these points regardless of what you play, you can always be improving your athlete. What's more, you will be able to take this character online in any mode, placing them (temporarily) on another roster in an online game, or test their skills against another player in one-on-one play or the Own the Court mini-game.

NBA '08 will feature play by play thanks to Kevin Calabro, the voice of the Sonics, with color commentary by Mark Jackson, which will add to the ambience of the arena. Every arena within the game has been completely redone as well, to give a larger sense of the game action. Even though the build we played was a pre-alpha build, the crowd looks much better than they did in last year's game, and will feature plenty of details like camera men that will track action along the sidelines. Referees, coaches and players will also receive a lot of attention with the hand signals that they use during the game.

Finally, the NBA Replay mode is receiving an overhaul. While nothing was wrong with it, the game will receive a brand new list of challenges. Chief amongst them is a new target area during NBA Replay games that accurately recreates the specific area that an action was carried out during a real game. This will take place in one of two ways: a player might have to pull off these target areas sequentially, just like the athlete did in a game. That means that you might have to pull off a three pointer from just beyond the line, and follow that up with a fade away jumper near the top of the key. The other way these target areas would take effect would be in an area cluster, so players would know what they'd need to do and could do them in any order they choose. We'll have more on NBA '08 soon, but for now, check out this interview with producer Erich Waas.